US anti-terror big data experiment 'breached privacy'

Big data is all the buzz in every field, from big business to science. So it's no surprise that the US Department of Homeland Security is trying it out too, attempting to pull information together from different government bodies with the intention of gleaning crime-busting information to foil terrorism before it happens.

The DHS set up 72 "fusion centres" across the US between 2003 and 2007 to do just that, allowing local law enforcement officers to cooperate with agencies up and down the chain.

But it hasn't worked, according to an investigation published this week by a subcommittee of the US Senate. The committee found that the information provided by the Department of Homeland Security's "fusion centres" was "oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens' civil liberties and Privacy Act protections".

The 140-page report claims that the DHS programme has been plagued by poor management while sucking up between $289 million and $1.4 billion in the past 10 years. The Illinois Statewide Terrorism & Intelligence Centre (STIC) is held up as an example of failure, after it flagged a supposed cyberterrorism event in November last year. STIC and the DHS both erroneously reported that a local water plant had been hacked from a Russian IP address, causing a burned-out pump.

The Russian IP address turned out to have been an employee accessing the network while on holiday, and completely unrelated to the pump, which burned out five months afterwards in any case.